Monthly Archives: February 2015

Research Update: February 27, 2015

Hi families!

We have been trying to keep our momentum going with our research process despite Mother Nature slowing us down these last few weeks.

Currently, students are planning for drafting by organizing their notecards into groups of main ideas. They will begin drafting next week, using their new Google Drive accounts, so you can have them log in and see their drafts from home as well!

Our big objectives right now are synthesizing notes into groups of big ideas, and then making sure we have at least 2 details – names, numbers, explanations, mini-stories, or quotes from experts – to explain each idea in our outlines. This work requires some higher-level thinking! I encourage you to talk to your children about the categories they are creating for their sub-topics and what details they are finding most interesting.

Weekly Update: February 27, 2015

Dear families,

this snow is making us a little crazy! I hope you all have enjoyed the winter wonderland and that the kids have gone out to play in it.

A few updates from homeroom:

– Kennedy Center field trip is scheduled for today!

– On Monday, March 2 we are going to the National Art Gallery on a field trip. Don’t forget to pack a lunch for your child unless you requested a bag lunch from the cafeteria.

– On Wednesday, March 4, we are going on ANOTHER field trip to GW Middle School.

– All homerooms are getting introduced to their Google Drive accounts. Please sign and return the bottom half of the letter that is going home with your child regarding his/her account. If you have time, it would be awesome if you could look through the account with your child. I will post some links to help guide your discussion with your child about online safety and digital citizenship.

Please get in touch if you have any questions!

 

How to talk to your kids about online safety and digital citizenship

Hi families,

as you know, students have received their login information for their Google Drive accounts this week. This is very exciting for the way it will revolutionize how our kids work, but along with it comes great responsibility to keep themselves safe and to be digital citizens.

Please take some time to talk with your kids about what it means to “stay safe online” and be a “digital citizen” – these are incredibly important topics in our kids’ generation! Below I have pasted some links with resources to help you start these conversations with your children.

How to talk to your kids about safe email habits

How to talk to your kids about digital citizenship

Research Update

Hi families,

What a crazy week with this weather! We have used the little time that we have had this week to gather notes for our research topics and begin to organize them. Most students have gathered at least 4 notecards per sub-topic that they are researching, using books and trusted websites (see previous post about trusted websites). Due to our limited time this week, I have given students an extension until Monday if they have not finished their notecards to continue their research over the weekend.

In reading, our original deadline for the books they are reading in small groups was this past Thursday (February 19) but due to the weather I gave students an extension until Monday. Please encourage your child to finish his/her books and thinkmarks and research over the weekend. Like I told them, when we lose time we all have a bit of extra work to do to make up for it, even though the weather is out of our hands.

This coming week, students will be creating Popplets to organize their notecards. Their Popplets will serve as their planning web for their research papers. We will begin drafting our papers on Wednesday of this coming week.

In word study, we are studying prefixes this week and next week. Students are also learning the words immaculate, vigorous, and tamper. Please talk to your child about these words! Students also added their own new words from their reading to their personalized word study lists. I encourage you to talk to your child about the new words he/she is learning in reading!

Hope you all have a great weekend!

Smart Research Online!

In the last few days this week, we have begun doing online research for our projects. Here are a few key points from our lessons about researching smartly and safely online:

  • Don’t use any old random Google search! It is not filtered for safety and some results might come up that are not appropriate for people your age. Use Sweet Search, Squirrel Net, or Find It VA (links from our blog on the right side of the page) instead.
  • Wikipedia is not a trustworthy research tool: it’s fine to use in your personal life when you are looking for information, but it can be written by anyone with an account, so we don’t trust it as a resource for our academic research.
  • Websites can appear legit and trustworthy and not be in actuality, so it is important that you use the three A’s to evaluate it: appearance, author, and accuracy. Ask your child about the process they go through when evaluating a website before using it! The attached photo shows our anchor chart for determining if a website is “AAA”.
  • We MUST cite our sources using MLA format! We are writing a list of sources and each notecard is labeled with the source it came from.

Please chat with your child about how research is going, and encourage him or her to spend a few minutes this weekend gathering a few more notes from their book or online resources.  Have a great long weekend, and we will see you all on Tuesday!

photo of website evaluation chart

Research writing rubric

Dear families,

I have attached the rubric I am going to be using to score students’ research projects. I am going to be revealing this to the kids little by little. The parts on the left side are the “big ideas” and the parts on the checklist in the middle are the steps we are taking to get there. This week, we are still in our researching and note-taking phase. Please note that this is a working document on Google Drive, so it may change between now and the end of our unit on March 6.

Please contact me or leave a comment if you have any questions.

Research Writing I-Can Statements

Weekly Update February 9

Dear families,

This week, we have a short week with conferences on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. If you have not yet confirmed your child’s conference time with teachers, please do so as soon as you can.  As a gentle reminder, we have early release on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

We have begun our in-depth research project in reading and writing – our first unit of the third quarter. Students are still reading fiction novels on their own, and completing Thinkmarks to show their thinking, but our focus in class time from now until March 6 is conducting an organized research study, then synthesizing and turning new learning into a research paper.

Please ask your child what his or her research topic and question is: everyone has chosen his or her BIG question that will guide the research process. If you have time to bring your child to the public library to search for more resources, that would be helpful! Please stay tuned as I will be posting the research rubric soon, which I will use to evaluate students’ research papers at the end of our unit.

Thank you again for visiting! Please take some time to explore the links on the right side of the page.